When the final co-milled oil is done, the mill is clean, and the weather turns cold; I know that it is time to bring out the pizzelle maker.

Pizzelle are delicious, tiny, very beautiful cookies. Named because they are flat and sweet. Like little lady sweet pizzas.

I have been making pizzelles since 1975, yes a long time. My first pizzelle iron was given to me as a wedding present.

We make pizzelle at IL Fiorello all December for taste treats for our guests. The sweet cookies pair very well with our presentation of Italian Moscato wine. A little glass, a sweet pizzelle and life is good in the afternoon.

The basic recipe starts out with a dozen eggs, 4 cups of flour and anisette. I think my family just drank the anisette in the afternoon. I personally like the flavor of lemon zest and Limoncello in the pizzelles.

You may use any flavoring you want. Orange zest, chocolate, lemon, anisette, walnut, chestnut, use your imagination.

A particular favorite of mine is to make lots of flat pizzelles, and make a “sandwich” with the filling of dulce de leche. Place the cookies over a mug of warm coffee and allow the dulce de leche to melt just a little. This is the way to begin the morning.

If you are in Italy, you may want to make a little “café correcto” by adding a little grappa in your cup to ward off the winter chills, before going into the grove to prune your olive trees.

Enjoy the recipes and if you have any questions about how to make these beautiful cookies just come on over. You will find us making them early in the morning for our staff and all afternoon for guests.

7. Centrifuge Number 1, the Decanter, separates material (pit, skin and tissue) from the oil

8. Centrifuge Number 2, the Valente, clarifying the oil

9. Storage 62° F, cold, dark and under an inert gas

10. Decanting is important and should happen in 6-10 weeks after milling

You can make good oil with good olives and good machinery. We learn new techniques every year and experience is valuable. With climate change, and general warming, we at IL Fiorello, have made significant changes to our methods and internal temperatures during milling.

An interesting question is when to harvest olives. This seems to be an easy decision. The answer; when they are ripe. But the real answer is actually much more complicated.

Before you plant an olive tree, you should understand what kind of olive oil you want to produce and what flavor do you want to present at your table. Begin with the variety characteristics as each variety of olive has its own profile, such as green fruit, ripe fruit, robust, mild, buttery, pungent, and aromatic.

To begin, you should know each of your varieties and their ripening process. Remember all olives start out green and all olives ripen to black. They ripen from the outside in so you may have a fully black olive but the inside is brilliant green and not even close to being ready.

Each variety ripens at a different time and different rate. You really have to know your olives, the climate, the mill you will be working with and whether you want a robust oil or a mellow oil. So the decision is to harvest early, or harvest late. Harvest early and you will have a greener tasting oil, much more robust with higher levels of polyphenols and antioxidants. Harvest later and you will have a more mellow oil with a shorter shelf life and lower polyphenols.

Other questions are equally important. Who is going to harvest your olives and what are the costs of harvesting? We estimate that cost to be the most expensive part of making oil. If you intend to rely on friends and family or crowd sourcing you can save money but you may not get all the olives harvested. Harvesting is hard work. We recommend that olives are milled within 12 to 24 hours of picking. Hopefully it will be cool enough to store them properly before transport to your milling site. Keep your olives in the shade. Keep them cool, to prevent decay of the fruit.

Decisions continue throughout the actual milling process so talk to your miller about your preferences. Talk early and often so that both sides know the process and the goals.

After milling the decisions about caring for the oil after milling, decanting, storage, storage temperature, and bottling will be the topic of another blog.

So many decisions! But knowing your olives, having good fruit, and engaging in discussions with your miller make the whole process much better. And much more fun.

It is tomato time, as all you gardeners well know. The gardens are overflowing with beautiful fruit.
There are tomato festivals everywhere, and so many different kinds of tomatoes to eat.
Red, green, striped, cherry, pear, yellow and even a purple one.

The bigger question is, what to do with this bounty? Here are some of our suggestions:

Sun-dried tomatoes to freeze and use all winter, in soups, stews, polenta and on pizzas. We have a small dehydrator and it only takes about 24 hours on low temperature to have a finished product. We will be serving dried tomatoes with goat cheese as snacks.

Yellow tomato gazpacho for a cooling refreshment. We will be serving this at our Suisun Valley Harvest festival August 28. The finishing touch will be avocado crema and a hint of something hot for the adventurous taster.

Red gazpacho for the more traditional look and taste, combined with cucumbers, peppers and lots of salt and olive oil this is a classic Spanish dish. Serve with toasted bread for the perfect evening meal. This is a make ahead and let it sit overnight to make the flavors better. Serve with sliced avocado as a topping.

Here is my recipe for homemade mayonnaise. Easy as pie to make and very delicious. Only 5-10 minutes to make this silky and luscious mayo. Leccino adds a lovely fragrance, and Mission will make it quite bold.
If at the end you add two stalks of cooked asparagus, it makes the mayo brilliant green.
Kids and adults will love the color. Fun with food is our motto!

HOMEMADE MAYONNAISE

INGREDIENTS:

1 large egg yolk, at room temperature

1/2 teaspoon mustard Dijon is good but you can use any favorite mustard

Add the remaining 1/2 cup oil in a very slow, thin stream, whisking constantly until well blended

Continue vigorously whisking until smooth, and all the oil is incorporated

Whisk in salt and white pepper to taste.

This makes about a cup. This can also be made in a blender, but it is more fun to whisk this in a bowl.
The vinegar and the lemon juice add the balance and the acidity to the finished mayo. Eat tomatoes fresh from the garden. Healthy, delicious with super good olive oil- it is a perfect treat!

At the Visitors Center at IL Fiorello, we present seasonal food pairings with our extra virgin olive oils and balsamic vinegar reductions. We are proud to source most of our food pairings directly from our organic vegetable and herb gardens.

Guests always ask what oils, what foods and what wines should be paired together. They always wonder why and how we do different pairings. There is no magic to pairing, usually if you like it together, that is the best pairing for you.

If you really look at the origin of food, wine and oil, you will recognize natural pairings. The geographic origin of the food, wine, or oil tells an important historical story. Where food is grown, wine is grown, and olives are grown together. Climate, soil, weather, and people all impart their influences.

Consumers have, and should have, different preferences, so you should be eating food, drinking wine, and using olive oil that you love and enjoy. You all have different palates but some people have different levels of sensitivity and tolerances. We often ask people if they enjoy coffee, and if so, most likely the expected bitterness of extra virgin olive oil will be a pleasant experience in the tasting room. The bitterness and pungency of extra virgin olive oil often astounds people but when the oils are paired with food, taste chemistry is at its best. The food and the oils shine.

Consider what food you will be serving at home and what that flavor profile means to you.

Here are some interesting food, wine and oil pairings that grow together. Something to consider that you might not have appreciated until now. We have tried to give examples of the cultural matching of food, wine and olive oil. The fun challenge is to find some of your own best matches.

Don’t allow people tell you how a wine or oil is “supposed” to taste. Taste it yourself, make a decision and then have a great discussion with your friends about your findings. Different people have different tastes and that is where the fun begins. Play with your food, that what we do every day at IL Fiorello.

This should be fun and enjoyable, and above all, the food, wine, and the olive oil should be delicious. Come and enjoy the experience of taste at IL Fiorello.

My Great Aunt, A Francophile and French teacher, taught me an old French method to serve beautiful fresh radishes. Slice the radish and serve with bread, the best butter and salt. Add a little olive oil of course, and you have the perfect afternoon snack. Try this as a first course or a simple hors d’oeuvre, appetizer in French.

Simply delicious.

When you have too many radishes, as we do (10 different kinds!), we pickle them. A quick pickle and you have a marvelous snack to use right away! Great on salads, hamburgers, or just plain right out the jar. Here is how to make them:

Harvest and slice about 4 cups of fresh radishes.

Standard Pickling Liquid2 cups White Wine Vinegar
1/2 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Water
1 Tbsp Kosher Salt
10 Whole Black Peppercorns
Dill to taste
Combine all ingredients in a noncorrosive saucepan
Bring the liquid to a rolling boil
Stir to just dissolve the sugar and salt
Remove from heat, add radishes and allow mixture to cool
Cool & refrigerate
Use tonight or this weekend
If covered and refrigerated, will keep for 6-8 weeks

The vinegar will be red because of the radishes beautiful color. Delicious, tangy, with a little heat & lots of flavor. Enjoy Spring!

The House Agricultural Committee finally has taken steps to stop the fraud and adulteration of olive oil coming from big corporations predominately in Europe. As we in the industry know, much of the bulk olive oils coming to the United States from Europe contain a large percentage of seed oils.

This is blatant fraud and does present a potential health risk to consumers. Certified Extra Virgin Olive oil should be only olive oil and nothing else. Seed oils mixed with olive oil should be clearly labeled and not called extra virgin. The California Olive Oil Commission has set standards for oils produced in California. This has sent shock waves through the European big corporate olive oil industry.

Truthful producers from around the world welcome this forward step toward transparency. At IL Fiorello we are proud to certify our oils, share the results with our guests and freely discuss our farming and milling practices. Honesty and transparency in the market place is the center of our business.

This is the expectant time of year where we watch for olive blossoms, blossom set and the resulting fruit set. Flower bud sprouting initiates the process of inflorescence. Average flowering used to be around May 10 but clearly with a change in climate we are seeing inflorescence now in mid-April. This year this is a full 4 weeks early. Temperature for the past two months have determined the time of flowering. Lower temperatures mean longer flowering periods, while high temperatures shorten flowering. Hail, frost, and very high winds may destroy flower buds. Water and nutrient stress between bud sprouting and six weeks before flowering reduce the number of flowers per inflorescence and increase the number of lost blossoms. So time will reveal what our actual crop will hold for us.

This is the first time that we as growers have a glimpse of what our crop may be in the fall.
And so far this looks like an amazing year at our groves. Some varieties will produce
heavily one year and not the next, which is normal for olives. This year, as was last year, our Frantoio is productive & the Aglandau French variety has more blossoms than we have ever seen. It is during flowering that wind pollination occurs. A good book for reference is Olive Growing by Barranco, Fernandez-Escobar and Rallo, from the University of Cordoba, Barcelona, Spain, 2004.
As olives are wind pollinated, the winds of Suisun Valley are welcome. The word “Suisun” means “west wind”. Suisun Valley winds come in the afternoon from San Francisco and San Pablo Bay and bring cool temperatures. We would like to have the blossoms stay a little longer on the trees so as to have a really good fruit set. But in farming we do not have those choices, nature is fickle.

We do have bees on site for honey production and to help with the gardens and citrus pollination. Bees love the pollen and nectar in the olive grove but olives produce differently.

We use the Italian variety named Pendolino to help with pollination of all of our olives. This is a productive tree in its own right, and makes a beautiful green grassy tasting olive oil.

Time to think about digging in the dirt, planning and planting your garden, and eating fresh vegetables.

Today it is softly raining and we have not yet finished mowing the olive groves. Some of the flowering mustard is as tall as my tractor. Nick, our assistant miller and super helper, keeps the tractor working, filling it with gas, and then sending me back out to mow some more. It is perfect in the grove. The olives are just about to begin blooming. The red wing black birds follow the tractor to pick up worms and bugs. No cell phones. No calls. Just me and the trees and the tractor. Happiness.

Nick and Araldo, our super work guy, have finished the raised vegetable beds. These raised beds are a showcase in front of the olive mill, all 34 of them. Each bed is 4’ x 10’, with chicken wire in the bottom to deter the gophers. This week we spent time planting radishes, onions, beans, chayote, and LOTS more. We envision a profusion of vegetables for our cooking classes and for our olive family. Our Chef is delighted that we are planting the raised beds behind the Visitor Center for herbs, cilantro, parsley, thyme, basil and tiny cucumbers (because they are so cute). We use Baker Creek Seeds because of their sustainability and their commitment to wonderful products. I get lost in their catalogue, beautiful pictures and planting suggestions (www.rareseeds.com).

Tours of the gardens will be great fun as we watch all things green grow and mature. The new green house is warm and tidy and little tiny sprouts of seeds are popping up.

With great delight, I have been talking to garden clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis, and Chambers of Commerce, in Northern California. I have presented our Olive Farm and how we grow olives and make olive oil. We have had some lively discussions about the problem of adulterated olive oils, and how to pair good food with certified extra virgin olive oil. I have met some wonderful people, whom I now consider my friends.

Much thanks to Nick and Araldo for all their hard work building the raised beds and moving dirt.

Come play in the dirt, and watch us grow. The radishes are up and growing.